Brazil is widely known as the country of soccer but there is a huge gap between investments in men's and women's soccer. Brands invest millions more in men's soccer than in Women's, always under the excuse that men's soccer offers more visibility to them. Even though gender representation is an important issue for most brands, they fail to make this point valid in one of the most representative places of Brazilian society: soccer itself. As a long time sponsor of the Brazilian Women's Soccer Team, Guaraná Antarctica had to do something about it.

The idea is pretty simple: Guaraná Antarctica is the second highest selling soda in Brazil. Every day, millions of people lay their eyes on our cans: an audience as big as any TV show, Digital Influencer or YouTube channel. So, we decided to make something that was entirely new: transforming our own product into a media placement and offering 35 million cans to whichever brand that was willing to invest money in women's soccer. The new logos were printed on them, replacing ours.

The insight was to create something relevant to communicate Guaraná's sponsorship to women's soccer that would have an unprecedented organic impact for the brand. The key message was: "Our cans as a media placement for any brand willing to sponsor Women's Soccer", and the idea was to make a statement on equality. The first target audience were brands, so we created a video that was first released through executive profiles on LinkedIn, who organically helped us spread the message. We also created media kits specifically aimed at major brands in Brazil, showing them how good an investment in women's soccer and in our product can be. We focused on selling the aspects that made our cans a media placement with huge potential in Brazil, with audience figures as high as any TV show, social media influencer or YouTube channel.

We launched two videos: one aimed at brands and one aimed at soccer fans. Both detailed our offer, which was also brought to the streets by OOH spots strategically placed in front of buildings with major brands: banks, restaurants, corporate towers.

The invitation lasted for two weeks: we targeted soccer fans, gender representation enthusiasts and associations of soccer fans to ask other brands to join our effort.

After more than 100 brand subscriptions, we announced 10 that would join us: Burger King, Lay's, Avon, Puma, ESPN, Hall's, BMG, Vivo, Gol and Consul, paying USD 100,000 each to sponsor Women's Soccer in Brazil. The announcement was made in our channels, as well as in the other brands’ channels. We sent kits with the cans to relevant influencers, journalists and soccer fans to make the message reach even further.

After that, 35 millions cans with the new logos reached supermarkets and stores.

We had over 160M earned media impressions. The campaign was widely covered by Brazilian media, both through the invitation as well as the announcement of the chosen brands. The campaign hashtag #ApoieOFutFeminino (#SupportWomenSoccer) is still being used by women's soccer fans, having organically reached Twitter Trending Topics two times during the campaign.

But the most important results come now: over 100 brands applied to the spot. 10 of them were chosen and donated $100,000 each to sponsor Women Soccer. Overall, the campaign raised $2.5M for women's soccer academies. Some brands went further: Puma offered its factories to make soccer kits for free, the bank BMG fully sponsored a women's soccer club, and ESPN decided to broadcast Women's National Finals for the first time ever.

At the end, we used our product to spread a powerful message in stores in every of Brazil, reaching places where traditional media is not present.